Scrap Metal

When we decided we weren't keeping and reusing the RV sidings, we planned to sell it to a scrap metal yard. Andrew went with me to sell it and we were a bit thrown off by what we saw. It was a first time experience for both of us.

(The quality of the photos below are terrible. I forgot to bring a real camera and only had my phone. And it's dark inside the scrap yard.)

I had called several different metal scrap yards and found out they pay a different price for clean and dirty metal. Clean metal was described as not having any glass, wood, screws, and staples stuck to it. Since I wanted to get the max amount of money we could, I had started cleaning off the pieces of siding. After cleaning one or two strips, I decided it wasn't worth the $0.20/lb difference (it's $0.40/lb for clean aluminum siding). It was going to take a really long time and there were other more important things I should be doing. We decided to bring all the siding as is to the scrap yard.

Since all the scrap yards were paying the same price, we went to the closet scrap yard, Asheville Metal Recycling.

I have to admit, I'm glad Andrew went with me. The scrap yard was dark, loud, and looked like bomb went off and cars landed on top of one another. It kind of creeped me out at first. I drove into building and onto a scale to be weighed with all the siding we were selling. I wasn't clear what I was supposed to go after the truck was weighed. There weren't any signs or people around to help out.

Not knowing what to do I just pulled the truck straight forward and parked it in an empty spot, which happened to be right next to a guy driving a fork lift with a car on it. I finally found someone to ask where I should to unload all the aluminum. He checked out the siding in the back of the truck, asked if it all looked like that (I said yes), told me that I would get the clean price for it (heck yes!) and pointed where we should unload it.

Our RV siding found its new home next to a pile of beer and soda cans.

After tossing all the siding out, Andrew and I walked over to this lady and asked her what to do with this one metal rod we had. She was standing in front of a computer surrounded by various scraps of metal.

She set the iron rod on a floor scale, pulled up the security camera photo of our truck when we drove it in, and pointed to a glass covered room across the way. This room is where we'd get paid for all the metal we dropped off. She said we needed to drive onto the scale again - to get weight again with the metal rod and then without the metal rod. We were in a hurry and Andrew suggested we just give the rod to them for free, especially since we wouldn't make much from it anyways. The guy sitting inside the glass office asked for my driver's license over and asked for my driver's license.

The guy did his calculations and rolled over to us in his sit with cash. We were super surprised and excited when he handed me $88! We recycled 220 lbs of RV siding!